With a Twist:
Bartenders sometimes use unlikely ingredients to create their own special flavors
New Orleans Times-Picayune
June 4, 2010
Alon Shaya, the executive chef at Domenica, spent nearly a year in Italy studying pasta and cured meats. While there, an after-dinner ritual made him realize the kitchen wasn't the only place at his new restaurant that required homemade ingredients.
In America, we're most familiar with limoncello. But in Italy, restaurants make liqueurs with ingredients both sweet and savory.
"When I saw it, I said 'We need to do this,' " Shaya said.
At Domenica, the shelves behind the bar are a laboratory for liqueurs. In one large jar, citrus is suspended in a mesh bag above a pool of 190 proof Everclear. The high-proof grain alcohol draws the flavor from the lemons or oranges, and then it's softened with water and simple syrup. Cut strawberries bob in a red-stained liquid. Fennel fronds float in another container. They'll emerge from a multimonth soak as a potent, savory drink that captures the dominant flavor of French green Chartreuse.
In New Orleans and across the nation, more bars are making their own ingredients. Some, like Domenica, look abroad for inspiration. Some reach back to the era before Prohibition, when making bitters and homemade syrups was part of the bartender's daily routine. And others explore cutting-edge techniques to capture new flavors in a cocktail glass.
At A Mano in the Warehouse District, chef Joshua Smith also experiments with traditional Italian infused liqueurs. He makes Meyer lemoncello, satsumacello and pomelocello, which uses bitter pomelos harvested in English Turn.
"We try to stay seasonal," he said, "but certainly making 'cellos' allows us to extend the season."
Ed Diaz, the owner of Bar Tonique in the French Quarter, was lounging on a Zanzibar beach when he tasted a surprisingly refreshing gin and tonic. When he got home, he found out that the FDA limits the amount of bitter quinine in U.S. tonics.
"A lot of these companies," he said, "also over-sweeten for the U.S. market. It's basically a soft drink at that point."
Working from recipes he found on the internet, Diaz crafted his own tonic using chinchona bark, citrus, lemon grass and agave nectar. [tab]
"Sometimes it's to make something we can't get," said Neal Bodenheimer of Cure. "Sometimes we can get it, but we think we could do better."
At Cure, rows of dark bottles along the bar capture the customers' attention. The contents, like a potent medicine, are added to cocktails drop by drop. Some are homemade bitters, which riff on bar-back standards like Angostura or Peychaud's bitters. Others are tinctures, a single flavor, such as fennel or rosemary, infused in neutral grain alcohol. Each one is like a pure pigment that lets the bartender add a single flavor to a drink. You can't buy tinctures at the local liquor store.
An arsenal of custom ingredients is also a way a bartender can win renown.
"If I make an ingredient that was in a classic cocktail," said Chris Hannah, the dapper bartender at Arnaud's French 75, "the guest feels like they're being treated to something they can't have anywhere else. And they can't."
Hannah makes compound butters for warm drinks in the winter. He experiments with flavored and fortified syrups he calls "drams." And he resurrects recipes found in antique cookbooks, like a parfait amour from "The Picayune's Creole Cook Book" he made with gardenias and hibiscus flowers picked in the Garden District.
On a recent warm evening, he was mixing mai tais with homemade orgeat, a traditional almond-flavored tiki ingredient, enhanced with wild blueberries gathered from Central City.
Alan Walter, the bartender at Iris, talks about his homemade syrups like an artist discussing color and form.
"When you make your own ingredients," Walter said, "it's like adding another digit to the variables you have to flavor your work."
He searches for new flavors everywhere. At the West Bank's Hong Kong Market, he found the floral pandan leaves. He uses the Southeast Asian ingredient to make a tea, which he adds to a simple syrup. It sweetens his Lombardi Cup cocktail, which also includes Bols genever gin, Punt e Mes, lemon, ginger and soda. He's also experimenting with Spanish moss syrup.
"I also love the basics," he said, "because there is always a new way to cast them. I'm going to be a student of the grapefruit my whole life."
At the elegant Garden District bistro Coquette, the cocktail menu hides a few avant-garde creations, like bourbon flavored with smoky Benton's bacon. To get the hog into the hooch, bartender Cole Newton uses a technique called fat washing. A fatty ingredient is steeped in alcohol, and then the liquid is chilled so that the fat rises to the top and can be skimmed off.
"If you do it right," he said, "you don't have any of the fat content in the end. But it does have that odd characteristic or umami quality."
Even if you do it right, meat-flavored liquor doesn't always please. Newton made a buffalo chicken infused Scotch that he called "polarizing." No one, not even Newton, liked the duck-fat infused cognac.
"I really thought it was going to be good. I was going to call it cognac confit," he said. "It tasted like Play-Doh."
Even homemade drinks rooted in tradition, such as the liqueurs at Domenica, can go wrong.
"We tried making a peach one a while back that tasted like Robitussin," Shaya said. "We learned some of the hard lessons at the beginning. Keep it simple, stick to the beautiful things that are in season and try not to overthink the process."
Retrieved from Lexis-Nexis on June 18, 2010.